Another nice example of now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t school reform comes to us from the Golden State. California instituted teacher testing 13 years ago, and with it an implicit pledge to the public that their children’s teachers would be able to read, write, and do math at least as well as someone who had finished the 10th grade. Not exactly an exclusive requirement, but progress over the former laissez-faire regime.
In the past, it was known that some who failed or didn’t take the test, called CBEST, were granted waivers (that’s in addition to the thousands of teachers grandfathered in when the tests began). Now for the first time, the number of waivers has been published: 1,082 in the state last school year, with some districts (like giant Los Angeles) requesting next to none, while others binged (much smaller San Francisco requested 59).
Even with the escape hatch of waivers, of course, insisting on 10th-grade competency is too much for the leading teachers’ union. The California Teachers Association wants the test done away with. Why even pretend to guarantee that public school teachers are almost as capable as high school graduates?
